


O fuge te tenerae puerorum credere turbae

by Ladycat



Category: Angel: the Series, Rome
Genre: Crack, M/M, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-11
Updated: 2014-02-11
Packaged: 2018-01-12 00:39:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1179847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladycat/pseuds/Ladycat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Who are you?" he asks again, the one question this boy -- Connor, though Octavian will never call him that -- refused to answer during their initial meeting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The boy is huddled when Octavian returns to his chambers, hidden behind curtains that do nothing to mask his nakedness. Octavian smiles, ignoring his frustration with his current bruised and battered state. He loathes needing to undertake such coarse, brutish actions, but it is soldiers of the state that go anywhere, and Octavian has plans to go very far indeed. He has to at least ape the part, and Pullo makes a better teacher than any Atia would've hired, at least.

Hera forfend, she'd probably choose that dirty, stinking Jew. She always goes to him for her dirty work, and this is, very dirty work indeed.

There are, however, advantages, both to the work and the sniveling man who works for them. Octavian hates the horse-stench and the greasy, ingratiating attitude, but he knows the man, like all his kind, is not stupid. Whether through his arcane religion or just a shrewd mind, he understands Atia's influence is waning as well as Octavian does, watching sand beneath her feet crumble to nothing under racing waves that rise up to drown her. He seeks a new master and Octavian is willing to at least grant him a temporary stay after such a find as this one.

The boy is thin, bruised skin -- pale where filth no longer darkens it -- stretched to breaking over bones that seem too long for his shortish stature. The greasy mop of hair has become brown after his bath, feathering down to cover those grey-mist eyes that hold more knowledge than any slave Octavian has ever seen before.

He'll have that knowledge. He'll have this boy completely, and he'll use him, mind and body, to get what he wants.

He's just not certain how, yet.

"Boy." The sharp jerk is all for show -- he's known Octavian was there long before the curtains were pushed in -- before exposing that rosebud mouth. "Sir?"

Not master, not as he should, but a soldier's salute. The tone is diffident, confused and concerned, but Octavian sees calculation in limbs that shift restlessly. "A massage," Octavian instructs, ruthlessly stripping himself bear. "You do know how to give those, I assume?"

Silence stretches long past what a slave should tolerate. Octavian allows it, trying to gage this newest acquisition, laying himself on the bed in anticipation of that long fingered hand.

Connor surprises him by straddling his naked legs before answering. "I can learn."

Octavian truly dislikes having to teach someone how to do a job they should already know long before approaching _him_ , but he suffers through. It's worth it. This boy looks as he does, too slender, too frail, too youthful, and the images is a pleasing one. He carries less meat on him, although Octavian is hardly the strapping lad his mother wishes for, but a few good meals will convert the hard, almost painful muscle Octavian feels against his buttocks and legs into something soft enough for him to tolerate.

"You're not from here, are you?" He's reclining on pillows, his legs spread wide while Connor's pink, soft, rosebud mouth is stretched over Octavian's cock. The boy sucks messily, lacking the whore's hard-won experience. Octavian enjoys it more. The occasionally glide of teeth, the muffled choking when he thrusts in too deep -- he hopes the boy never grows as proficient and skilled as the brainless girl he'd lost his virginity to. She was a breeder, nothing more. This is something worth treasuring.

He's tight, almost too tight, and Octavian forces himself to work oil-slick fingers within him -- he's heard tales of what happens when boys are taken dry. threats, truth be known, and the memory burns -- before ordering him into position. The boy blinks at him for a few moments, confused, before slowly pulling too-long arms and too-thin legs up toward his chest, exposing genitals and ass.

Octavian's body responds, wetness at the tip glittering in the candle light, even as he reaches out to slap the boy across the back of his thighs. "Do you know nothing? Hands and knees."

"Is that how you do it, here?" A glimmer of humor -- of _condescension_ , amusement where there should be only breathless compliance -- has Octavian boiling with rage, his cock hard and proud as it stands up, away from his body. "Too bad I never went to school like dad wanted. I could've taken classics classes."

The words make no _sense_ , but Octavian will ask more questions later. For now he is rutting, as animalistic as the disgusting Atia, fucking hard and deep into an ass that has no flesh, only hard bone and muscle, flexing eagerly. He _grunts_ with each thrust, the bed shaking beneath them as Octavian pours out a feeling he never knew he could experience, lightning sparks racing up and down his spine while a heat that rivals the hottest of fires coalesces in his belly, ready to burn through his own flesh if he cannot pour it into this boy's.

He does, crying out sharply, eyes wide and blind as he continues to move and thrust, into a boy that groans and _matches_ him, spreading wetness through blankets Octavian is supposed to sleep on.

Instead of disgusting him, it makes him fiercely proud, almost smug, that the boy is this fey, enjoying the hate Octavian has gifted him with.

"Who are you?" he asks again, the one question this boy -- Connor, though Octavian will never call him that -- refused to answer during their initial meeting.

"I can't get back."

"Back where? To where your home is?"

"When, and yeah." Night shadows meld with the bruises darkening his pale skin, but it is the moonlight that catches his eyes, burnishing them silver. Inhuman, maybe. Not dangerous, though -- not to _Octavian_. "I'm stuck here."

Octavian reaches out, forcing himself to cup his fingers around the boy's cock, stroking it up and down just to see his eyes flutter shut, mouth slack and open as he enjoys the possessive touch. "You'll teach me what you know. Your skill with fighting -- "

"How did you -- "

Octavian's hand tightens into pain. " _Never_ interrupt me."

A normal slave would cower in fear at provoking his anger, babbling assurances and pleas. Connor merely stared at him, a glimmer of a smile cutting darker, fathomless less lines in skin that is as fresh and dewy as Octavian's. "You want me to teach you to fight. And?"

"And anything else you might know that will be of interest to me."

"Okay." He actually _arches_ up into Octavian's grip, sliding his cock through his fist the way the girl rocked and whined when he took her, trying to find a certain kind of pressure. The half-lidded look returns and his breathing becomes shallow, agitated. "I can do that."

"Of course you can. You belong to me, Octavian. You'll do anything I say."

He's almost asleep before he places the flash of something in Connor's face as _recognition_ , and not the fear he'd been pleased to see. Not of confirming his lack of status, either. Of his _name_.

He'd recognized Octavian's _name_.

Perhaps he'll try Pullo's suggestion, next time. That whores will always spill their secrets when being taken, their greedy, pleasure-seeking minds made loose and malleable by their fallen ways. Perhaps he'll try it as soon as he wakes up, whether or not the boy that breathes evenly beside him is awake, too.


	2. Edge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Octavian shaves every morning without fail.

Octavian shaves every morning without fail. He has for several years, painstakingly guiding the curve of a straight, gleaming blade over his cheek, down his jaw to glide around the narrow point of his chin. He does this himself, foregoing the servant who waits anxiously in the corner of the room; the servant's face is a mask, of course, as blank as the frescoes adorned on the walls. The hands give him away, though: tense knuckles and fingers that flex in echo.

He continued to do this until the arrival of his newest, strangest slave.

Tucked in his corner, the boy watches with unconcealed curiosity. For a boy who seems dressed in shadows, reposing into darkness so quietly that he could disappear between one breath and the next, he is _consumed_ with questions. His eyes burn with it, grey and alive the way the coolness of his body sometimes forces Octavian to doubt.

"What," Octavian demands.

The boy shifts, limbs longer and thinner than Octavian's—and yet, the strength in them, the contradiction that he chases like a rabbit, hunting through too many warrens—until he looks directly. "What, what?"

"Ask your question, slave."

No longer does the boy cover a wince of discomfort at his naming, although Octavian suspects that is more to do with dismissing the meaning of the words, than recognizing the truth of it. This, too, keeps Octavian bound to him like a thrice-damned geas.

"You're shaving."

"That is an observation," he raps out, "not a question."

Any other slave would have cowered in fear, horrified at such reprimand. Well, the younger ones would, Octavian amended with rueful disdain. The older ones would've just bowed with the same phlegmatic blankness as always.

Not so with this boy. A ghost of what could've been a smile chased over his features. "Why are you shaving?"

The unspoken _you don't need to_ rings out loudly enough that Octavian absently feels his cheek for the slap that should've come with it.

No, he does not need to, to his everlasting shame. His mother blames it on his fair complexion and hair, tittering as she compares him to his father. His sister claims it is only right, since all patricians should be clean-shaven, and the gods are simply giving him one less thing to concern himself over before he storms the Senate. Their teasing—well, Octavia's teasing—is kindly meant, a joke among family members. Even through his mother's manipulations, Octavian is well aware of the indulgence and fondness to her words, the promise of adult manhood to come.

Yet every time it's mentioned, Octavian burns with loathing at them all.

He knows the stories, of course, that Caesar was a beautiful boy in his youth, fair and golden and beloved of men and women alike. The latter is still true enough, after all, although their attentions may be due more to his power than his looks. Still, Caesar was never so slight, so painfully effeminate as Octavian knows he is. Caesar had _balance_.

Octavian has none.

 _Still_.

A brief pop of rage lights within him, burning fast and bright. "Come here, boy," he says, voice already unsteady with eagerness.

The boy comes, unfurling himself like he is still as gawky as Octavian knows himself to be, slinking over to sit at Octavian's feet. His mouth—small, so _small_ —is down turned in what anyone else would think to be a frown of dismay.

Here, now, it is a _tease_.

His fingers tremble as he cups the slave's chin, forcing him upward to rub his thumb with and against the grain of stubble that grows there. It makes a horrible rasping sound that curls in Octavian's stomach: promise, a promise and taunt both.

"How old are you?" he demands.

Calculation burns bright, lines of numbers, words and meanings built up like an actor's lacquered mask runs through the boy's eyes the way Octavian can run through a column of numbers. "Eighteen, I guess," he says.

Octavian backhands him quickly. "You guess? Your numbering is nearly as good as my own." Challenge.

"It's complicated," is all the boy says, in a tone that even Octavian has learned not to cross. He won't get a useful answer from it, no matter how many words or pretty sounds he wrings free.

Breathing deeply to calm the flutter in his stomach, Octavian returns to his exploration of the boy's rasping growth into manhood, enjoying the sting to the pads of his fingers. "Up," he says, voice mimicking the sound stubble pushed against grain. "Go wet your face."

Octavian's hands are slick with oil when the boy returns, falling into that half-crouch he's perfected, the one that has to hurt, awkwardly holding himself to Octavian's slightly shorter stature. It's a posture of subjugation of submission, but there is pride in the trembling of his narrow shoulders, strength in the clench of his thighs, the straightness of his back.

It makes Octavian want to beat him, blood racing to a martial drum. It makes him want to win a contest long called in his favor.

He forces himself careful, precise as he exposes pinking skin to cool air. The sound of it fills the room, as thick as the scent of incense-laden oil, filming over Octavian's eyes as he scrapes and glides, whicking the blade against the strap as he never does for himself, cleaning it before going over cheek and chin and the fragile, delicate skin beneath the jaw, the skin that smooths to nothing on the boy's neck—Octavian goes over it again and again.

Patches of his skin are red from abuse when Octavian finishes, bumps appearing where he was clumsy, or the skin particularly sensitive. The deep flush matches the ever-constant color of the boy's mouth, the richness of a bloom in full summer, neither the red of blood nor the pink of his sister's rogue. It is both, a taunting slash of color, more brilliant against the revealed pallor of skin protected from sun and wind, reborn because Octavian has demanded it to be thus.

"Bed," Octavian commands, his voice deeper than its ever been before, commanding enough that even Caesar himself might pause, might grant him the respect Octavian knows is his by right. _"Now!"_

The boy scrambles, flailing because he knows—has to know—how much it is enjoyed, stripping himself boyish and bare as he falls onto his back. Normally Octavian would correct the position, leaving reddened hand-prints until the boy was placed, as tractable as a warhorse and just as easily bid, but today this _is_ the proper position, his face upturned and exposed, waiting even as he spreads his legs wide, holding himself open like he is a gift instead of possession.

Like he is _offering_ instead of acknowledging truth.

The challenge is unmistakable and only a barely-there remembered lesson of Pullo's has Octavian slicking his cock with the oil that still covers his fingers and palm, leaving smears of it on the boy's body as he falls on him, biting and licking at that soft, soft skin, those not-red lips, creating his own marks as he shoves and thrusts, as eager and oblivious as an animal, focused only the way the boy's skin tastes, like promises and ashes, like blood that comes from no human born. When Octavian finally angles his way in—pushing all the way in fast and hard, just to feel that uncontrollable _jerk_ of what might be pain, might be pleasure—for one terrifying moment he thinks his heart will stop.

He finds himself snarling, drawing blood that tastes of copper mined from some far-off shore, fucking with harsh, brutal strokes that shoves the boy up and down the bed. His back will be raw—more red, always more red—and Octavian dreams of whipping it, darkening the color until it was rich enough to be worn on his robes, until the boy will arch and plead and moan, yes, moan as he does now, eagerly accepting each rough thrust.

"You enjoy this," he hisses, licking his teeth, the boy's teasing, flaunting mouth. "You _enjoy_ it."

The boy says nothing, only the barest curve tilting his lips, eyes grey as a winter's storm, filled with knowledge that Octavian wants, that he _will_ have, _has_ to have, and he spends himself abruptly, groaning as release borders too closely on pain.

Eventually, Octavian lets a hand rest on the slave's belly, working his fingers against hair he is still denied, as well. "Go clean the razor," he instructs, purposefully brushing the inside of his wrist against the boy's hardened cock. He tugs, fingers cruel against his balls, tangling them in what he finds there, as well. It's to prepare him, maybe.

And maybe it’s because the boy lets out a soft, whimpering sigh, cock twitching with eagerness.

Octavian smiles his slave, calm for the first time since waking. "I want you bare."

**Author's Note:**

> Title: Loosely translated: "Oh, beware of trusting a crowd of tender boys", from Tibullus' the Love of Boys, in Liber I


End file.
